Ah, for the good old days of the Defense Department’s $600 toilet seats and $435 hammers.

The U.S. Army spent $247 million on a blimp-like aircraft that was canceled after one flight. It’s now selling the craft back to the contractor who built it — for $301,000, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The craft was supposed to hover over Afghanistan for three weeks at a time, using onboard surveillance equipment to give troops on the ground full view of the war zone. But the project fell eight months behind, and the craft’s weight ballooned by an extra 12,000 pounds, the Government Accountability Office reported. The extra weight meant the Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle could stay aloft for just four or five days, instead of the 21 days the plans called for.

After one test flight in New Jersey, the project was scuttled. The Army stripped off the surveillance equipment and now plans to sell the underperforming craft back to Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd., the British company that made it.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked in a speech to defense industry leaders this year, “… why were these programs allowed to continue beyond the point when senior acquisition management and their industry partners knew, or should have known, that their original cost, schedule and performance assumptions were no longer valid?”

Good question. That kind of reckless spending makes one wonder just how much the sequester cuts really will hurt the military.

Just think: For $247 million, the Army could have had 411,666 toilet seats or 567,816 claw hammers.